Nov. 11, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:59
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| It's Monday. | ||
| It's Monday, 10 November Year of our Lord 2025. | ||
| It is the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States Marine Corps in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Marines. | ||
| Michael Pack, are you with us? | ||
| You've got a big premiere tonight. | ||
| We're also going to talk about another film that you're working on right now about Afghanistan. | ||
| And part of this is about the Marines. | ||
| We'll get to that in a second. | ||
| That was the Marine Corps Museum down at Quantico. | ||
| Cleo Pascal and Colonel Grant Newsham are with us. | ||
| Colonel, I'll start with you. | ||
| Having dedicated your life to the Corps, what does it mean for you today on the 250th anniversary of it? | ||
| As said, I know you're a historian and done great work, particularly your book, When China Attacks. | ||
| There are not many institutions in the history of mankind that have lasted for 250 years, sir. | ||
| Well, it's an institution that has really been designed to do one thing, and that is, if necessary, die defending America. | ||
| There's not too many institutions that have that as their basic premise. | ||
| And it's never had any shortage attracting people. | ||
| It's had high standards. | ||
| And when it's kept them, it's done very well. | ||
| And this is ultimately what the Marines are about. | ||
| This is the ultimate in self-sacrifice. | ||
| And every Marine that you ever see has had to pass a pretty difficult test just to be called a Marine. | ||
| So it's a fairly exclusive club to get to be part of it. | ||
| We had the Major General on today that was in charge of Paris Island. | ||
| We talked about the transformation. | ||
| How do you take an average American kid, I guess above average, right, and turn him into a Marine, someone that can face the intensity of Fallujah and Najaf in Second Fallujah, where you're in some of the most incredibly difficult urban combat that anyone has ever fought in? | ||
| What's the transformation process? | ||
| How do you take the raw material of an average American kid and turn him into a United States Marine? | ||
| Well, it's one of the most astonishing things you'll ever come across that they've been so successful at it for so long. | ||
| And you've obviously got to expose them to an awful lot of pressure and stress and then show them how to deal with it. | ||
| And not everyone can, but most people will be surprised exactly what they can handle. | ||
| But there's no easy way around it. | ||
| And the easier it is in a training environment, the less likely it is you're going to see it succeed in a place like Fallujah or Najaf. | ||
| And you see all the results of it. | ||
| And the interview with Scott Cuomo, this is as if you got to talk to somebody who was at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, took on the Japanese and finished them off. | ||
| It's the same raw material they take and they turn it into something that does America's sort of bidding for it and just slays our enemies. | ||
| And it is ultimately a crucible. | ||
| You are testing people to see what they can handle. | ||
| And as I said, generally speaking, they can do it. | ||
| Not everyone can. | ||
| And with officers, it has to be even harder because you don't want these Marines led by people who can't handle the stress. | ||
| So the harder it is, the better it is. | ||
| Of course, if it's gratuitous, gratuitous bullying, that doesn't really get you very far. | ||
| But it is a pretty successful model that the Marines have for stressing people, showing what they can handle. | ||
| And you instill this self-confidence in them. | ||
| And that ultimately is really what it's about with the Marines, plus this absolute dedication and devotion to the nation, to the idea of freedom. | ||
| You'll notice that after they do go out and fight and win, that the first thing they want to do is go home. | ||
| They don't want to keep territory, stick around and enslave people. | ||
| They just want to go back to their peacetime lives. | ||
| And it's amazing that they keep getting this raw material and producing the kind of Marines they have. | ||
| And to my way of thinking, this has always meant that at the senior-most level in the Marine Corps, the senior officers, that there's an immense responsibility to get this right, to make sure that you don't squander this resource, don't squander these lives. | ||
| And that is a constant challenge. | ||
| And sometimes they do better at it than others. | ||
| But the young officers, the staff NCOs, the NCOs, the junior Marines, they always perform superbly. | ||
| It's just a question of how well they're led. | ||
| Colonel Newsham, in the film, and one of the things that jumps out at you is that you have the Lance corporals and some of the corporals are 17, 18, 19 years old, by and large. | ||
| The non-commissioned officers are not that much older. | ||
| Some of the sergeants are, but a lot of the non-commissioned officers are in their early 20s. | ||
| And the junior officers who were throughout this, the second lieutenants and first lieutenants, as Scott told you, he was, what, 22 years old? | ||
| They're in there early. | ||
| So you have a bunch of teenagers just in modern American society where people are transitioning to that formative period to become men. | ||
| You took this film because we showed it everywhere to Marines. | ||
| And the feedback we got in showing it to Marines, whether it's at Pendleton or wherever we went, was overwhelming when Marines saw it. | ||
| The most overwhelming, to Colonel Newsham's point, is that you went, I believe, out to the West Coast to show it to the Force Recon alumni. | ||
| There was a meeting at Quantico. | ||
| At Quantica. | ||
| Force Recon. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Force Recon from Pelelu and Tarawa. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And people should know the Marines have no special forces. | ||
| They consider themselves special forces. | ||
| But if you had a special force in the Marine Corps, Force Recon is those Marines that, like the Marine Raiders, you go in early. | ||
| And these were the Force Recon in two of the most horrific battles in American history. | ||
| Every bit as brutal as Normandy. | ||
| Two amphibious landings in these atoll islands in the Pacific that are legendary when people study history, but particularly in the Corps. | ||
| At the end of the movie, tell them what the Force Recon said about the young men they'd just seen. | ||
| Well, the movie ended, and actually there was like dead silence. | ||
| I thought, God, I mean, were these guys paying attention? | ||
| I mean, what's going on? | ||
| And then they really started talking, and they were deeply moved. | ||
| They were, as you say, among the most moved. | ||
| And they said they could not do what the young Marines did in Fallujah and Najaf. | ||
| They said when they got on those islands, if they saw a Jap, as they still call it, they'd kill him. | ||
| And if a Japanese guy saw it American, they'd kill him. | ||
| Rules of engagement, very simple. | ||
| To have to deal with the complexity of this kind of warfare where you see a woman, does she have a suicide vest? | ||
| Does she somebody have to help? | ||
| Is that guy down the street going to kill you? | ||
| Or is he a civilian that you have to win over? | ||
| And you heard that. | ||
| Does the little kid have an IED, or is he just a little kid going down the street? | ||
| And making all these decisions. | ||
| Scott Cuomo talks about just this idea: you can't shoot in the mosque, you can't do this, you can't do that. | ||
| You got to respect the feelings of Shia Islam. | ||
| These guys, what do they know about Shia and Sunni Islam when they were in high school? | ||
| The point these guys made is that in the World War II, when they hit Tarawa and Pelelu, you know exactly where you're going. | ||
| You're going to hit the beach. | ||
| You're not going to back up an inch. | ||
| You're going to clear-cut everything in front of you. | ||
| It's all dead. | ||
| If it moves, it's dead. | ||
| We don't have any decisions to make other than the fact that we do not go backwards, we go forwards. | ||
| Whereas in all three segments, all three acts, Fallujah, Najaf, and Fallujah, it's this incredibly complexity of going door to door and kicking in doors and clearing houses or watching out for mosques, watching out for religious things. | ||
| The complexity, the rules of engagement laid on 18 and 19-year-old kids and their leaders who happen to be 21 or 22 years old is almost mind-numbing in its complexity and how in the urban battle space when you have no time at all for decisions, how it eats on people. | ||
| You can see why they have this concept of PTSD, how it starts to eat on people. | ||
| Because in Fallujah, in the second Fallujah, it was 250,000 residences or 250,000, I think, locations you had to clear up to a million rooms or something. | ||
| There's some statistic that's like overwhelming. | ||
| There's something like that, like 200,000 population of Fallujah. | ||
| Most of them left, but they all had houses and you had to go street by street, house by house. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's an incredible thing to ask of these people. | ||
| I mean, of course, that World War II generation is called the greatest generation, but I do not necessarily think that those Marines were greater than the Marines. | ||
| Oh, no, I found that. | ||
| They told you that. | ||
| They told me that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's the power. | ||
| The greatest generation said, hey, we don't know if we're as great as these kids. | ||
| That's the power. | ||
| Colonel Newsham, Jan Bender, a combat photographer who was on the trigger of his rifle more than he was even on his camera, is going to join us here momentarily. | ||
| He said something very powerful to the Premier. | ||
| He had been a young guy that had been in the Army first and then was in the Marine Corps. | ||
| He said about his Marine training, about how do you get ready for this, that what struck him about the Marine Corps is how tradition and custom and history are drilled into you every second of every day that you're a Marine, that you're just imbued with this so that when you come into situations like Najaf and Fallujah, you know what's required of you. | ||
| You know about Pelelu. | ||
| You know about Terawa. | ||
| You know about all the battles all the way back to the revolutionary period and what you stand for. | ||
| Can you tell us about that? | ||
| Well, yeah, you're imbued with this idea that you're part of something much bigger than yourself. | ||
| And it is an organization that regards itself as the finest fighting force ever. | ||
| There's a pretty good case to be made for that. | ||
| But you do feel you're part of the Marine Corps. | ||
| And when you saw that you see a crowd of former Marines, say, celebrating the Marine birthday, and these are people, it is a cross-section of American society. | ||
| And every one of them has that common bond. | ||
| And it never leaves them. | ||
| And it does have an effect on you, this sort of training. | ||
| And if you figure that, say, what happens on the battlefield, half of it's psychological, at least. | ||
| That if you can get this psychological strength wherever it comes from, and does come from being part of an organization where everybody has met a standard and is ultimately willing to die for you, that that is immensely powerful. | ||
| And it is something you really can't overstate, that the psychological aspect of being a Marine. | ||
| And they do a pretty good job of getting that across. | ||
| And the Marines that have come before us, everybody is aware of that. | ||
| And that goes back all the way to 1775. | ||
| And it really does make a difference. | ||
| And today's Marines, they are as good as they've ever been. | ||
| The leadership, of course, I think that is always a challenge at the top levels. | ||
| But the raw material, the young Marines, that is as good as it's ever been. | ||
| Do we have Poseobic? | ||
| Do we have a clip from Jack's interview earlier in the day? | ||
| Do we have that? | ||
| Let's go ahead. | ||
| I'm going to bring in Poseobic. | ||
| I got Cleo Pascal, Michael Pax here. | ||
| Do we have the clip? | ||
| Can we go and play it? | ||
| If we don't, I'll start with Poseobic. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play it. | ||
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When it comes time to fix bayonets and charge, as I once said, the opportunity to get that command, then you fix bayonets and you charge. | |
| You're expected to. | ||
| Wait, you were, hold on a second. | ||
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You were still using bayonets in 1966. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's a great weapon. | ||
| When it came time to take a position, the reinforced battalion, and just my company going up against it, used every supporting arm I could, artillery and aircraft. | ||
| So the sun is going down. | ||
| You don't want to attack a position where they know where they are, but you don't know where they are. | ||
| So I said, there's only one thing to do is fix bayonets. | ||
| And when the bayonets went on, it's this amazing resolve that came over the company. | ||
| It's like, this is as grisly as it's going to get. | ||
| You know, we're not going to shoot somebody at 300 yards. | ||
| We're going to smash or slash or beat to death another human being. | ||
| And at the end of that, at one end of this rifle, at the other end, there's going to be someone alive and someone dead. | ||
| That was General Riper earlier today. | ||
| Jack, tell me about that, going fixed bayonets. | ||
| Well, see, I believe that was actually General Duarte who came in on that one. | ||
| But talking about the fixed bayonets, I mean, it really gets you, and it was incredible to be in Philadelphia to be with the Marines, to be with the Vietnam vets who went through this. | ||
| And I kind of pulled a Steve Bennett there. | ||
| I said, wait a minute, hold on, walk me through this. | ||
| Bayonets in 1966. | ||
| And he paints this picture of going up against the communists. | ||
| And he said, it's not 300 yards. | ||
| It's not 200 yards. | ||
| It's the length of a rifle. | ||
| And at the other end of that rifle is another human being. | ||
| And you're going to get in for the real grisly work. | ||
| That's what fixed bayonets means. | ||
| But I thought what was so interesting in that description, there was a moment he mentioned that when he gave that order, he actually said there was a firm resolve that came over the entire company. | ||
| That when they put that bayonet to the end of their M16, they all knew what was coming next. | ||
| That now was the time that it was going to get grisly. | ||
| Jack, you had an opportunity today in kind of the cold and rain to visit with Ernie Priate and his brothers in arms that gave so much in Vietnam. | ||
| Talk to me about that, but the KIAs of the pamphlet they handed out, it was six or seven pages just of the killed in action in Vietnam from their unit. | ||
| Steve, that's right. | ||
| So we're there with Mike 37 company, and that's six, it was seven pages single spaced of the KIA. | ||
| So you're looking at, you're talking about some of the most intense fighting in the Tet Offensive, the post-TET offensive, where you've got guys, and Steve, not only that, but in the pamphlet, you had the dates next to one another. | ||
| And you would read that so many of the men died on the same day. | ||
| And you realize, well, that's in the same activity. | ||
| That's in the same action, whether it's an offensive or counteroffensive that they're involved in, you know, or some ambush, some action with the Viet Cong, with the enemy, the NBA that they were getting involved with. | ||
| And it's an intensity that I think the average American, certainly in today's day and age, is just not used to. | ||
| And the intensity that even, and I had Dan Caldwell on the show today, and he was in Iraq. | ||
| And he said, Jack, what the Marines went through in Vietnam, it was a magnitude higher than Iraq and Afghanistan, just in terms of the sheer numbers that were involved. | ||
| And it's part of the history that I think has been kind of lost. | ||
| And you zoom out from all of it, that these are the best of us. | ||
| These are the best men that the United States has to bear. | ||
| And when we send them overseas, we better darn well know that we're doing it for the right thing and the right reasons. | ||
| Because those men were willing and in this case did give the last full measure of devotion for their country. | ||
| You see, and the ages, they're so young, 18, 19, 20. | ||
| And to see so many of them who didn't make it back at all, not to mention the ones that came back missing limbs, missing arms. | ||
| And that's what you saw as well for the Marines that were still there today as a matter of honor and a matter of duty, as the general informed me, to stand there in the place for the men who didn't make it back. | ||
| Yeah, the double amputees there today were just incredible. | ||
| Jack, before I let you go, Philadelphia, the pride of a year before the country really comes together as a nation, the Marine Corps is born in Philadelphia on this day 250 years ago. | ||
| Your thoughts as a native of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania? | ||
| Well, Steve, as the Marines would have it, the United States could only be founded if the United States Marine Corps went in first and secured a perimeter. | ||
| They went in to secure the perimeter about nine months prior, and then the United States could be founded. | ||
| And of course, as the story goes, it was in Tun Tavern right there at Penn's Land. | ||
| So William Penn steps off his ship from England 344 years ago, almost 350 years ago today, and about 100 years before the birthplace of the Marines. | ||
| And they're in this tavern, Tun Tavern, same spot, we call it Penn's Landing today. | ||
| And they're all looking around. | ||
| And earlier that day, the Second Continental Congress had given a, or the First Continental Congress rather, had given a resolution for two Marine divisions. | ||
| And they said, we need men who are willing to fight on, to go to sea and fight. | ||
| And where did they start? | ||
| The taverns of Philly. | ||
| They go into the taverns of Philly and they say, we're looking, and the famous line, of course, we're looking for a few good men. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Jack, your social media, I know you got a lot of stories about this. | ||
| You had great coverage today. | ||
| Your social media, where do you go? | ||
| If the United States need it again, call on the men of Philly and we'll be there. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Jack Pasovic, thank you so much for joining us tonight. | ||
| God bless Steve. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great job today. | ||
| Incredible footage. | ||
| Cleo Pascal, you've gone throughout the Pacific to talk about the sacrifice of what, the 100,000 Marines that we lost, 100,000 servicemen, the vast majority of those Marines that died taking these islands and what we've given up to date. | ||
| Your thoughts on the 250th birthday of the Corps? | ||
| Well, just very quickly to defend the honor of Boston, we were up in Boston for Fun Friday for their 250th, and there were 2,000 Marines at the convention center going after one piece of cake. | ||
| It was, I think that the Boston Marines have a lot to say about the Marine Corps today. | ||
| And that is a city that loves their Marines and has given a lot as well. | ||
| I think there are several cities in the United States that could go down a similar route, but really that was quite phenomenal. | ||
| And today, that little clip at the beginning, that wasn't a recording. | ||
| That was Marines who had come down to the museum from, they had come from New York and from Florida. | ||
| They had driven all the way just to be there with their fellow veterans in order to be able to sing the hymn together on their birthday. | ||
| And there was the oldest Marine we had. | ||
| There was a 104-year-old Marine who handed the cake to the youngest Marine, who is a 19-year-old Marine. | ||
| And that legacy and continuity was incredibly touching. | ||
| But also there, walking in in time for the 2 p.m. cake cutting, was Sergeant Major Justin LeHue, who you had on the show, who is still very actively involved with History Flight and trying to bring home the boys who are all over the Pacific and who are just waiting to be brought back. | ||
| And as we discussed before with Sergeant Major LeHue, the Chinese are actively trying to make it difficult in places like Tarawa. | ||
| So they are still, those men lying on those beaches are still waiting to be relieved. | ||
| And in the meantime, the Chinese are winning the second Battle of Tarawa. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| Cleo, where do people thank you for going to Boston? | ||
| I saw your footage was incredible. | ||
| What's your social media? | ||
| Where can people track you down? | ||
| Today's the Marines Day, so please go to historyflight.com and help Sergeant Major LeHue and all those guys bring home the Americans that are still waiting to come back. | ||
| And thanks to Mark Noah as well, who founded History Flight. | ||
| It's an incredible organization. | ||
| You know, we followed Sergeant Major Lehue since you introduced us, and I didn't realize until we started talking the other day, and he was showing me some footage going down. | ||
| I said, can you tell your crew to? | ||
| I love the shot. | ||
| Can we get away with everything? | ||
| He goes, I am the crew. | ||
| He turns around. | ||
| Of course, being a Marine, he's carrying the entire thing on his back. | ||
| It's pretty extraordinary. | ||
| Colonel Newsham, where do people go to get your book When China Attacks and all your other writings, sir? | ||
| Well, you'll find When China Attacks on Amazon.com. | ||
| That's the easiest. | ||
| And everything I write is at grantnusham.com or GrantNewsham at Center for Security Policy. | ||
| And the X is at Newsham Grant. | ||
| Colonel, thank you so much for joining us today. | ||
| 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The tradition continues. | ||
| Talk to me. | ||
| You made this film on battles that were fought because we put it out in 2006. | ||
| The battles were fought 2004. | ||
| So it's 21 years ago. | ||
| 21 years ago. | ||
| 20 years ago, but in 2021, in August, in the leaving of Afghanistan, you have another story of the Marine Corps. | ||
| What do you have? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We're now doing a series of short documentaries with the Wall Street Journal with our new company, Palladium Pictures. | ||
| We've done two. | ||
| We have three in the hopper. | ||
| And one of them is about the withdrawal from Afghanistan from the time that Joe Biden announced we're going to zero in April to the final withdrawal at the end of August. | ||
| So, unlike the Less 600 meters, we do look at how it happened and why and who made those decisions. | ||
| But it begins and ends with the bombing at Abbey Gate. | ||
| And I think we should remember those Marines, the ones that died there, surely. | ||
| But also, we asked these young Marines at the gates, at Abbey Gates and at the airport at Harman Kazai International Airport, to really do something, I think, even harder than what the Marines did in Najaf and Fallujah. | ||
| They had to man these gates while all these Afghans crowded, begging to get on. | ||
| They were standing in sewage. | ||
| They were throwing their children over barbed wire, over razor wire. | ||
| And these Marines were having to stand up. | ||
| There was a panic, a herd that was trying to get out because only death awaited them. | ||
| Death or torture awaited them if they were left behind. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And because the State Department could not provide enough consulate officers, the Marines had to decide. | ||
| They were at the gates. | ||
| And for one thing, they would have to decide who to admit. | ||
| And the State Department kept giving them conflicting opinions. | ||
| 18-year-old kids making the decision of life and death. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so they were. | ||
| And so there were times when they would have to take women and children back out of the gate to be surely executed by the Taliban. | ||
| And to ask young people to do that, to have to decide, make this sort of Sophie's choice kind of decision, bring some people in, and then take some people they knew should be in and let them out to be killed is a horrible thing. | ||
| It's not even ordinary combat. | ||
| You know, these people suffer from what they call moral injury, a term I had not heard, which means participating in something that runs against your values, participating or witnessing. | ||
| And that's even harder to deal with, I think, psychologically than PTSD. | ||
| And it's a spiritual crisis for them. | ||
| It's something no soldier or Marine should ever be asked to do. | ||
| And they stood there and they did it. | ||
| And I don't think they get the credit that they deserve for having to do that day after day in that kind of crisis, especially at this 250 days. | ||
| Let me get back to you in a second. | ||
| I thought Jack Posovic, oh, Jan, yeah, but we're going to take him in the next block after that. | ||
| When does this film come out? | ||
| It'll be out next year. | ||
| We're editing it now. | ||
| It'll be out sometime next year. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| And it'll be on the wall. | ||
| You know, the story has never been told about, because you think they're just the gate guards. | ||
| The story's never told that those young people, those young Marines, were tasked with also making the decision of life and death of others, not just not worried. | ||
| Just don't be worried about yourself. | ||
| You've got to make the decision for these other people too. | ||
| It's too much to ask. | ||
| Do you get, do you have the Marines that have survived? | ||
| You're going to be able to do interviews with them? | ||
| We have one, Joe Laud, who has actually started a foundation to support these Abbey Gate Marines, which I think is great. | ||
| I hope you put it up and people can. | ||
| Oh, we'd love to have more. | ||
| And we would like to have more. | ||
| If there are other Abbey Gate Marines out there that want to be on our film, I hope they contact us. | ||
| But Joe Laud, he's very eloquent. | ||
| He talks about it. | ||
| And really, these people that were at the gates doing this, they deserve some kind of combination. | ||
| It's not quite, you know, I don't think the Marine Corps has done enough for them. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| In fact, talk about eloquent. | ||
| We're going to have Jan Bender on from the movie The Last 600 Meters. | ||
| And his talk, his discussion after the film last week was two weeks ago, was quite powerful. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| The last 600 meters premieres tonight, 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on PBS. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Back in the warm in just a moment. | ||
| We come up and we're right beside this house and we're looking down the street and I think we were just kind of getting our wits about us. | ||
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And this fireball just explodes right beside us. | |
| It's like it was like a sledgehammer of the chest and boom, hit this wall. | ||
| And And we're kind of shaking my head, and of course, you can't hear anything. | ||
| You got these guys yelling, and it goes from, hey, Marine, get over here to, oh, like you can't, guys are yelling, and you just can't hear it because your head's rung. | ||
| We didn't understand what had happened. | ||
| We thought a car exploded or whatever it was. | ||
| And as we pull guys back into this courtyard and we clear the first house we were in, you know, our staff sergeant tells us that was a tank. | ||
| And we'd never, personally, I'd never been that close to the tank when it fired. | ||
| And we were probably less than six feet from the front of an Abrams main gun and it thumped. | ||
| You know, it rung all our bells. | ||
| Facamo and I are looking over some paperwork in one of these rooms, and I'm kind of, he's right in front of me, and we're close. | ||
| You know, we're kind of face to face, looking over the stuff and trying to read. | ||
| And out of the corner of my eye, I basically see an Iraqi man. | ||
| You know, we called it a man dress, but the average attire for an Iraqi guy is basically a floor-length dress shirt, you know. | ||
| And he's got the rag around the top of his head or whatever. | ||
| And he comes in and just instinctively, you know, you've been in this environment and this mindset for so long that that means danger. | ||
| That means death in a lot of circumstances. | ||
| And, you know, like I said, it was out of the corner of my eye, and I didn't really want to allure him to the fact that I knew he was there, but I just draw fast. | ||
| I got my 9-mil right here, and I pull, aim in, and I'm half-squeezed on this trigger. | ||
| I mean, I am, in my mind, he's already dead, and it's Bolof. | ||
| And he'd thrown this Iraqi attire on, thinking it was funny. | ||
| And it really was not funny, especially when you're inside the city of Fallujah. | ||
| So he got a body slam for that one. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I don't know. | |
| He just wasn't a very deep thinker, I guess. | ||
| So, Michael, when you were kind of accused by PBS of maybe curating, either having actors or curating people who are perfect, the combat photographer, Jan Bender, is so extraordinary in this film of his way to describe description. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| When you started interviewing him, we're going to have him here in a second. | ||
| When you started interviewing him, did you realize you had struck gold as a filmmaker? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I mean, he had great footage, and he was great. | ||
| I mean, you could see how articulate he is. | ||
| Just describing standing next to a tank going off. | ||
| I mean, he is so, you feel like you're there. | ||
| I did feel like I struck gold. | ||
| And, you know, as I said about Scott Cuomo, now he's 17 years older. | ||
| He's still articulate, but you could see how young he is there. | ||
| And the story of Boloff shows you they're horsing around because they're kids. | ||
| They're like high school kids. | ||
| And you could do something stupid. | ||
| And it almost happened there. | ||
| But that lets you see that it's not all, you know, shooting. | ||
| They're dealing with, you know, there's downtime. | ||
| There's horsing around. | ||
| There's some mixture of issues of growing up and learning how to be a man. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Learning how to be a man. | ||
| Jan Bender joins us. | ||
| Jan, so your task and purpose was to be a combat photographer. | ||
| You were tasked by the Marine Corps as a Marine to capture what it was like to be in Fallujah. | ||
| But in the very first moment we see you, you're coming out of a back of a half-track or a thing and you're saying, hey, you know, I had my rifle up. | ||
| I didn't get a lot of great footage that day because I was on the trigger. | ||
| Tell us about Fallujah and your experience, sir. | ||
| Yeah, Steve. | ||
| Thanks for telling our story, Michael. | ||
| Thanks for capturing it. | ||
| Can you hear me there, Steve? | ||
| Yeah, it's perfect. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Yeah, so, you know, my role in the Marine Corps was to serve as a combat correspondent. | ||
| So I've heard you talk with others about the power of the Marine Corps, what sets it apart as a branch. | ||
| One of the tenets and foundations is that every Marine is a rifleman first. | ||
| And so as a combat correspondent, you have that skill set in addition to that. | ||
| But you're carrying a long rifle and a pistol along with whatever video or camera equipment you might be assigned. | ||
| And in the fight, in the push through Fallujah, I was a videographer. | ||
| And so, but in that circumstance, anytime you're a part of a team, especially in a tense circumstance like this, what's first on your mind is to be an asset and not a liability. | ||
| And so you've got to be able to pull weight and contribute to the fight, but at the same time, understand when and where you can capture the story without putting yourself or your buddies at risk. | ||
| And so it's a bit of a delicate balance. | ||
| But yeah, it keeps you on point and paying attention. | ||
| Jan, in Fallujah, you know, there'd have been a gap between the first battle and the second when all the Chechens and the worst elements of the world, the civilians left, but the worst elements of the world came there and you guys had to go through the entire city. | ||
| Talk to us about that, the intensity of, because this is an environment unlike maybe the Ted Offensive. | ||
| Maybe in Way City, we had fought a little bit like that, but it had been since Way. | ||
| And so you're talking about Marines that would go back to the 60s, right? | ||
| To the Tet Offensive. | ||
| That's many decades. | ||
| How were you guys ready for this type of intense urban combat? | ||
| Well, I think we trained for that type of fighting. | ||
| Now, that intensity and that longevity, I don't know that there's any training you can duplicate to mimic that kind of intensity, you know, for weeks on end, door after door, house after house, rooftop after rooftop, street after street. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| But I can tell you, in my work as a combat correspondent leading up to that time, I'd been in country. | ||
| So 3rd Battalion 1st Marines was the unit I was with, India Company specifically. | ||
| They'd been in country for four to five months at that time. | ||
| I'd been in country for about two months, and I'd done a number of operations with them in and around the suburbs, you might call it, or the satellite villages of Fallujah, doing shaping and feint operations, prepping for the big fight in the city. | ||
| And I'd also been with a number of other battalions. | ||
| And I could tell you that 3rd Battalion 1st Marines, having been longest in country at the time and the most entangled with the enemy, they already had skin in the game. | ||
| They had not pushed through the streets of Fallujah, but they'd been on the perimeter of it, and they'd taken a lot of losses. | ||
| Over 10 Marines were killed outside the city before we even pushed in. | ||
| So they were bloody as a team, and they were ready to push into the hornet's nest and give what they had gotten, and meet the insurgents in the safe haven that they'd been drawing strength from and coming out outside of the city to attack us on patrols and in our Ford operating bases. | ||
| So I think the psychology of having been in a counterinsurgency fight, death by a thousand scratches or cuts, the tension, there was thick with the need for a reckoning. | ||
| So I think that at the end of the day, when you look at the tenacity and the level of violence that was unleashed inside the city, a lot of it was built up over the months preceding that. | ||
| Piano makes a very, you know, dramatic comment about three-quarters of the way of the film after he's been shot. | ||
| He was talking to, I think, a lieutenant. | ||
| He talked about if you're fighting an enemy that doesn't mind dying, how are you supposed to beat him? | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| No, he nailed it. | ||
| And I think that, you know, we've seen elements of that prior to getting in the city. | ||
| And anytime you're up against suicide bombers, and there was an elevating trend across Ambar Province with suicide vest and vehicle-borne suicide bombers hitting our Ford operating bases. | ||
| So we'd had tastes of that. | ||
| But to be in the same streets and potentially in the same houses with that same fanatic mindset is pretty daunting. | ||
| And I think when we saw, you know, a few blocks into the city and a few days into the city, as we started to press them, as Colonel Buell talks about in the film, into the Queens area of Fallujah, and a lot of your hardened fighters set their feet and knew that this would be their last stand. | ||
| And their goal was to take as many Westerners with them as they could. | ||
| Our tactics had to change as well. | ||
| And Colonel Buell will tell you that we got orders from the top down. | ||
| We should not be sending Marines into houses that we haven't already sent shoulder-fired rockets, satchel charges, tank rounds, whatever we've got, we should be softening the targets with before we send in young Marines. | ||
| And in the midst of the shock and while the smoke is still rolling, we go in and mop things up. | ||
| But your tactics have to evolve in the face of that. | ||
| When there is no surrender, when there is no willingness to go to death. | ||
| You shifted quite quickly in the film. | ||
| This was not a mop-up operation. | ||
| You guys turned out, it looked like most of you were the tip of the spear, right? | ||
| You did have tanks and artillery, and sometimes had aircraft over and above, but you guys were going door to door, correct? | ||
| And kicking down the doors and clearing the rooms room by room. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| But when we knew that there was resistance in a house, undoubtedly, like AKs over the top of the roof, clear signs that there was a enemy in a house, we did what we needed to do to soften that building before pushing Marines to the door. | ||
|
unidentified
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But that's like a hell of a mouse. | |
| Yeah, so in How House, where you weren't out there, they were stuck because Marines were already pinned. | ||
| So there's no possibility of hitting it with a tank round, right? | ||
| You have to go on yourself. | ||
| Jan, you tell this, people have seen, right, you know, war movies, et cetera, but you made a comment pretty early on in your interview that when you first got there, you were the new guy, right? | ||
| Historically in the movies, the new guy gets it first. | ||
| Talk to me about that when you first joined up as the new guy about to go into pretty intense combat. | ||
| Yeah, so the nature of my job as a combat correspondent and not unique to me, it's the, you know, the skill set as a whole. | ||
| You typically drop into units just before things get interesting. | ||
| And it's exciting and it's fun, but you become somewhat of a bad luck charm. | ||
| And it's important to integrate with your team in that and understand how they move and flow and communicate so that you can, again, be an asset, not a liability. | ||
| And you know from experiences you've had in life, you know, the last thing you want to do in the midst of a high-intensity situation is change things up, you know, hand somebody a new tool or, you know, change the plan last minute. | ||
| And so these Marines are trained to fight in their teams the way they're constructed and throwing the new guy in can sometimes create interesting scenarios. | ||
| But I was really blessed in the sense that I had been out with 3rd Battalion 1st Marines before. | ||
| I knew a number of Marines that I ended up in the same squad and fire team as. | ||
| And so I was able to integrate quickly. | ||
| I think initially, there would have been a belief that transitioning from the fire team that I stitched in with to maybe another squad or another battalion might have made sense, or another platoon rather in the battalion might have made sense. | ||
| But it became really clear to me and the team that I was with that this is not the time to change anything. | ||
| There's too many moving pieces. | ||
| There's too many external threats. | ||
| We've got to lock in, lock and low with what we've got and cling together to get it done. | ||
| What did you learn about yourself in this fight? | ||
| Yeah, I think it may sound cliche, but in the midst of when you face your mortality, it has a clarifying effect. | ||
| And so I definitely forged a deeper relationship with God and the men around me. | ||
| I think you, you know, nothing bonds like shared suffering or sacrifice for a common cause. | ||
| And between that, that reality and the reality that you'll never feel more alive than when you're that close to dying, those things have a clarifying effect and serve to energize you with purpose and clarity. | ||
| So I leaving the city, I, one, was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude and love for gratitude that I made it through, you know, physically unscathed, which is pretty rare in that group of Marines. | ||
| And also bonded to the men around me and just a great admiration for their courage and tenacity and their unwillingness to quit. | ||
| So incredible experience that I forever grateful for and changed by. | ||
| Jan, do you have social media? | ||
| Is there any way people can keep up with you or get your coordinates now or a website? | ||
| I keep a pretty low profile. | ||
| Not really out there. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Jan Bender, looking forward tonight, 10 o'clock, the national premiere of The Last 600 Meters. | ||
| And I'd look forward to the whole country to see about you guys and what you guys accomplished. | ||
| Your task and your purpose. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thanks for telling our story. | ||
| Michael, you too. | ||
| Great to talk to you, Gianna, as ever. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| So articulate. | ||
| Thoughts tonight? | ||
| 17 years, 17 years in the process. | ||
| And I will say this after seeing it on the big screen, because I haven't seen it probably in over a decade on the big screen with the sound and everything like that from when we first started taking it around and showing it to Marines. | ||
| As bloody as it is, as awful as it is in the situation, I don't think, and this is what the generals told us for us, I don't think you could have a better recruiting film for the Marine Corps. | ||
| Well, these guys, I mean, you can see why PBS did think I was central casting. | ||
| You know, these guys like Jan are incredibly articulate and Scott Cuomo. | ||
| And they happen to be normal U.S. Marines. | ||
| And you see them so young in the film. | ||
| Not that they're not still great, but you see them as young people and speaking from their heart. | ||
| I had not seen it on a big screen myself in a long time. | ||
| I too was impressed. | ||
| I mean, we tell their stories. | ||
| The strength is really their footage, their stories. | ||
| And they're really pretty, they're incredibly moving. | ||
| And it was a privilege to tell them. | ||
| And I think we captured an important moment of history 10 years from now, 17 years from now. | ||
| When people want to think about these battles, and I hope they do, they hope they look at this film and see what the young men, and it was all men and one woman, you know, did. | ||
| And she was amazing. | ||
| She was amazing. | ||
| She's amazing. | ||
| And beautiful. | ||
| You're beautiful. | ||
| We're not going to tell you. | ||
| She's like a movie star comes in the middle of this thing as a guardian angel. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Right. | ||
| She's a guardian angel. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Basher. | ||
| Basher. | ||
| I want to talk about courage before I leave in you. | ||
| People may not know this if you haven't seen when Michael's been on before. | ||
| You were absolutely brutalized. | ||
| President Trump selected you to be the head of the global broadcasting facility, something that Carrie Lake is trying to take apart now. | ||
| It was not just Voice America, but all of it. | ||
| And you were by far the best pick. | ||
| You were somebody that had a reputation in the conservative movement of being a fabulous filmmaker, such that now you're partnered with the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| I mean, the quality of the stuff you see from this and all your other stuff, and particularly the brickover movie we made, which I love. | ||
| And they tortured you for three years and tried to destroy you for three years publicly. | ||
| Not just humiliate you, but break you. | ||
| I got about two minutes here before we go. | ||
| Tell us about that because you showed tremendous moral courage in not quitting. | ||
| In not quitting. | ||
| You could have walked away at any time. | ||
| You said, I'm not going to do this until I'm confirmed. | ||
| But look, you know, we make this films about these guys like Jan Bender and Scott Cuomo. | ||
| Then I have to, then I fold. | ||
| I mean, when you're under attack, you either fight back or you fold. | ||
| And, you know, Steve, you said at the time you didn't think I had it in me. | ||
| And I didn't think I had it in me. | ||
| But you're just. | ||
| I didn't think anybody had it in you. | ||
| Folks, it was three years. | ||
| It was three years. | ||
| And it went on beyond the administration. | ||
| They still pursue life with you. | ||
| They still pursue you. | ||
| They go after your business. | ||
| They go after your reputation. | ||
| It was a horrible thing. | ||
| And, you know, you can't really get that back. | ||
| But, you know, we all survived. | ||
| Did you not think you had it in you for a minute? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| And neither did my wife, Gina. | ||
| But, you know, but since we only have two minutes, I do want to mention a more optimistic upbeat thing. | ||
| And that is we, because there are too few filmmakers that can make films like The Last 600 Meters on the right. | ||
| Because it is a craft. | ||
| It is a craft, and people need training, and there's a vast amount of training and experience if you're on the left, and there's not there on the right. | ||
| We have started this incubator program to train young, right-of-center, non-woke filmmakers. | ||
| And we give them money to make a short film, and we oversee it, and we execute produce it, and we mentor them, and then we get it distributed. | ||
| And we've had two classes in already, and we're selecting the third class. | ||
| It's run by my son, Thomas. | ||
| And they can go to our website. | ||
| I was in diapers when I first met you guys. | ||
| How's it growing? | ||
| So where do people go? | ||
| They go to, for that, they go to palladiumpictures.com and for the other films, older films, manifoldproductions.com. | ||
| And my social media, the incubator is PalladiumPictures.com. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Just click on incubator. | ||
| And where do people go for all your content, everything, social media? | ||
| They can go to that Manifold site or the Palladium site or manifoldproductions.com. | ||
| My ex-account is Michael Pack underscore. | ||
| But there's more info really on the two. | ||
| If I can get Gina to commit to produce, executive produce myself, I may go back and just join the incubator. | ||
| No, I'm going to give this up and just say, I want to go back to the incubator and learn and really learn how to make films. | ||
| You're a hero of mine. | ||
| And tonight, extraordinary. | ||
| And tomorrow it's on Amazon. | ||
| Finally, we taught Michael Pack how to be an entrepreneur. | ||
| Well, if it took 17 years. | ||
| Tomorrow it's on Amazon. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The last 600 meters. | ||
| You will have quite an experience. | ||
| On the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps, what stuns me is you see this film and you realize this organization has been around for 250 years and it gets better every day. | ||
| It's an amazing organization. | ||
| Amazing organization. | ||
| The men's department of the United States Navy, as proud to say. | ||
| Okay, we'll see you back here at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. |
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